Yes, you read that subtitle right. There are [b]5 years[/b] of history behind this little game. [url=http://phpbb.mfgg.net/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=13228][Thread][/url] [url=http://mfgg.net/index.php?act=resdb&param=02&c=2&id=26988][Main Site][/url] It all began back in early 2007 when I started a game titled "Mario Colosseum". It was supposed to feature a wide range of unique boss fights. [img]http://i.imgur.com/VqiIo.png[/img] The original test room. The game was supposed to be my "greatest engine ever" and be completely perfect. It wasn't at all. It's very easy to get stuck in blocks and there are silly common bugs like dying when jumping on multiple goombas. Regardless, I began working on the bosses. [img]http://i.imgur.com/W2vSd.png[/img] This was supposed to be the first boss. The graphics have since changed because I overwrote the source file but everything used to be SMW. Piranha plants heads were supposed to pop up from underground, and you had to knock bombs out of the ? Blocks into them. The AI for the boss never worked properly and the game was scrapped. The "YOU WIN" message is being displayed in the image because the game does not detect any piranha plants in the room (the object was deleted). This boss was later reworked and added to [url=http://mfgg.net/index.php?act=resdb&param=02&c=2&id=12785]Super Mario Galaxyish[/url] and changed so you only had to stomp them.[url=http://i.imgur.com/O56T8.png][*][/url] It is now the second half of 2007. Hype for Super Mario Galaxy's release in November is building. At this point there had not been any fan games that utilized the gravity changing. Not any complete ones that did a good job of it at least. I pulled up that old Mario engine and decided to begin testing with it. [img]http://i.imgur.com/6TJae.png[/img] Touching the arrow changes the mario object into an upside down mario object. I began experimenting some more and made it work with four way gravity. Arrows all over the place isn't very efficient though, and it doesn't look that good either. Also I didn't take a screenshot but I was proud of it so I'm mentioning the fact that you can bump a goomba on the ceiling with your head to kill it. [img]http://i.imgur.com/N8hWF.png[/img] [img]http://i.imgur.com/9NyK1.png[/img] I changed the way gravity swapping works by creating invisible gravity field masks and lining walls, etc with them. It worked surprisingly well and allowed for me to have easy and full control over the player's gravity or so I thought. [img]http://i.imgur.com/xJnb8.png[/img] I tried to incorporate the idea with irregular objects, it didn't go as planned. The issue though was that my code wasn't very good for detecting collisions with blocks/platforms. This caused Mario to get stuck often, especially so on the irregular object. I didn't have the means to be designing oddly shaped planets with the tileset I was using anyways. Also, the game originally only flipped Mario and not the view. When he was on a wall, up would make him walk up it, and down would make him walk down. While this sounds nice in theory, it was actually annoying to constantly change between controlling with Left/Right and Up/Down. Instead I decided to make the camera rotate with Mario. It worked pretty well, except for when nearing edges of the room. When rotating you were able to see past the tiles, so I had to be clever to hide it. In Super Mario Galaxyish, the background is a black star tile. Outside the room is pure black. Gravity Goomba draws an object behind the character which is larger than the view. A second issue was that the aspect ratio flipped when Mario was on a wall. It looked really weird, so I had to change the view so that way it was a square. This way the player wouldn't notice any difference when rotated. After the camera was sorted out, development of the first level began. [spoiler][img]http://i.imgur.com/fpHDR.png[/img][/spoiler] While not easily noticeable, there are a ton of things wrong with this. First, the gravity fields cause several issues. Mario has the same problem with rotating that the views did. He isn't as wide as he is tall, so I had to place gravity fields a bit away from walls so he didn't get stuck. This meant that you could walk over to a wall, jump, and not change gravity. I tried to use clever level design to mask this but [url=http://i.imgur.com/T6TSf.png]some spots slipped by me.[/url] Second, you can easily avoid gravity fields which is both frustrating and confusing for the player. [img]http://i.imgur.com/TfDoI.png[/img] Here I illustrate how to jump off the ledge, zip by several platforms that Mario [i]should[/i] be attracted to, and fall onto the wall way over to the right. Of course, you can also do this in reverse from the opposite side. This causes Mario to fly past some platforms and go straight out of the room to his death. Third, there are no landmarks. It is hard for the player to know exactly where they are when everything looks the same. While it might not appear to be very difficult to navigate from the screenshots, it definitely is with a small, rotating viewport. When designing the environment for Gravity Goomba, I didn't just use a different tile set because I felt like it, I used a different tile set so that way the player would be able to have an idea of where they were in relation to the rest of the map and have an easier time navigating. I included the lines to the stars and a static background for the same reason. With a static background, the player always knows which way is up, something confusing with the star tiles. [spoiler][img]http://i.imgur.com/rjWf8.png[/img][/spoiler] This is Galaxyish's hub world. The other areas are [url=http://i.imgur.com/cxdXX.png]desert[/url], glass (which was later incorporated as the Ice Blaster section of Gravity Goomba), and a pipe world. Halfway through designing the desert area, the real Super Mario Galaxy came out. Disheartened at the fact that my game could never live up to it, I scrapped it and uploaded it to MFGG. I was pretty shocked when it received good reviews. The thing that stood out the most though was the fact that people wanted more to the point where some of them actually abused the wall jump glitch (hold both left and right when to the left of a wall) to get over the barricade in the hub world. That sparked me to make this post: [img]http://i.imgur.com/EHlqB.png[/img] [url=http://www.elyk19.co.cc/galaxy.htm]It wasn't until March of 2011 that I actually came through on this promise.[/url] Skip forward to May of 2008. There is a minigame competition being held on MFGG with "gravity" as its theme. I decided to redo my old gravity changing engine and give it a go. I wrote the entire thing from scratch, fixing the issues with collision and collapsing the four mario objects (normal, upside-down, left wall, right wall) into one player object. [img]http://i.imgur.com/nlaHA.png[/img] Unfortunately I lost the source for this part, but this is what one of the levels looked like. Notice how Mario is rotated a bit, this is his default position, rotated to 0 degrees to make it easier for the rotation to be done within one object. As you can see from my badges, I didn't win. Skip forward a bit again. I look back on my older games and think about why the gravity didn't work and determine that it was due to the gravity field objects. So I destroyed them and replaced the system with a single tracking object. This invisible tracking object points from the center of mario to the nearest solid floor, giving control over gravity from any distance without any extra objects. [img]http://i.imgur.com/FISJc.png[/img] This is the test level that I tried out the new system on. It worked pretty well and added a bit more realism to the game, especially around corners. With the new system you keep your momentum. It is possible to use the gravity of small objects to fling yourself and it is possible to bring yourself into an orbit as well. Mario was replaced with a goomba because a goomba is as wide as it is tall. This means that when flipping there is no chance of the goomba getting stuck within a wall. [img]http://i.imgur.com/NLVdx.png[/img] This level will later go on to become the Thwomp Trail area of Gravity Goomba. [img]http://i.imgur.com/CJUVk.png[/img] The change in the gravity system broke most of the levels that already existed in my minigame comp entry. They are all still possible but not playable in the way they were intended. For example, in the above screen shot you are supposed to fall through the pipes. This idea was also intended originally for Galaxyish's pipe planet stage. [url=https://www.box.com/shared/x8a8ruem92][DL Link][/url] [img]http://i.imgur.com/Y5vmu.png[/img] In the summer of 2009 a slightly newer version was created. This version replaced the graphics and music to try and create an 8-bit theme. I also added water. [url=https://www.box.com/shared/fnt9ronjf7][DL Link][/url] However, I had learned from my past experience that this graphical style wouldn't work for this game. It would be too hard for players to navigate the game universe unless I created some new tiles. Unfortunately I am no artist, and there weren't any really good custom tile sets around to use so the game ended up sitting in development purgatory for a long time. Jumping now to October of 2011. NCFC is on the horizon. I'm in college. The last time I participated was 2009. In a desperate struggle I dig up Gravity Goomba and spend the entire day replacing the graphics and designing four different areas. The goal was to make it open world and easy to navigate. I planned for eight, but time wasn't on my side. One of the areas I planned was a circular planet, where you enter and fight piranha plants from the inside. It sounded cool in my head but it didn't work with my blocky planets. [img]http://i.imgur.com/0hCbt.png[/img] [img]http://i.imgur.com/Dft1V.png[/img] Not pictured is the area that was "designed" first. I littered the sky with single blocks to test that the engine was working properly, it was. That area became the Fire in the Sky section (later changed to be 1x2 and 2x1 platforms). The next area designed was the maze to test close range gravity changing. It worked well enough. The thwomp and water sections are then completed next and Gravity Goomba releases in time for NCFC. During the design of the four areas one of the main things I thought while playing is "this is frustrating". It became priority then to observe people's reactions as best I could to my game. Did they find it frustrating? The maze lacked landmarks or any real clear direction, could people still complete it? To my surprise, it seemed like people were actually okay with the maze. The biggest issue was the cloud section. It was too easy to swing around and get yourself killed on 1x1 platforms. People also asked for checkpoints, but I felt that the inclusion of checkpoints would make the game too easy because the areas are so small. I release an update to the game mid-NCFC adding a section with Sparkys as well as a secret way to bypass the maze. Nobody plays it. Now it is 2012. I have just gotten out of college for the semester and it's time for summer break. I think back on what games I have left to complete that are worth continuing. Gravity Goomba is one, [url=http://www.elyk19.co.cc/mlac2.htm]Mario Learns About Colors[/url] is another. Gravity Goomba is the easier of the two to complete, so I did it first. I added two new areas: [img]http://i.imgur.com/pkArE.png[/img] [img]http://i.imgur.com/iEEve.png[/img] As previously said, the second image was originally intended to be part of Galaxyish's glass world. This world would have also included Thwomps which smashed through the glass shattering potential platforms. As a finishing touch I made the game able to save collected stars and tossed in a final boss for good measure. And there you have it. Five years of history for one fan game which was ultimately thrown together in a rush and more or less designed to be frustrating. tl;dr: I learned things also Mario Learns About Colors coming Summer 2012 (maybe)

Heh, I know what it's like to spend five years on a game. Pretty nifty little story though about how a concept can change so radically over time.

I enjoy fangame history thingies, so that was an interesting read! I can't wait until Mario Learns About Colors is released in 2017.

Wait... Is that the goomba I made? Did I have a part in the history of Gravity Goomba? Neat. Seriously though, it's cool to see how a fangame grew to what it is. I'd make one for MM if I could remember the older stuff.

>using smg gravity lol